One of my cars was stolen last weekend!

Thankfully it was only the little blue one that lived on my letterbox.

The blue guy had been there for almost 4 years - not bad given the reputation my 

street has.

HummVee Letterbox - 15/11/2011

Of course, the blue truck was to replace a red one that had only lasted a month before being stolen.

Letterbox Tales - 21/07/2011

That didnt take long... - Wed 24/08/2011

The blue truck lastest longer because I’d made more of an effort to secure it - which means that they stole the entire roof the letterbox. People are daft.

I’ve made a temporary timber roof while I decide what’s to come next in the letterbox saga, Stay tuned.

 

So LEGO Dimensions landed last week. It’s LEGO’s most recent computer game, and a major push for the company.

It’s basically Skylanders of Disney Infinite but with LEGO. If you’ve never played those games (like me), the idea is that you collect toys that have special bases. You put these bases onto a pad that comes with the game and connects to your console, which lets you use those characters in the game.

So if you put your Aladdin toy on the pad, suddenly Aladdin appears in the game.

The other games come with figurines rather than actual toys - they look good on display, but you can’t really play with them apart from the game.

LEGO Dimensions comes with actual Lego. Apparently you can change the models and that changes the in-game model too - but I’m not really sure how that works. 

Anyway - I don’t have the game, and don’t really intend to get it unless it gets cheaper.

I’m not sure how the game will go - as the packs are quite expensive. Base game is over $100 (ranges from $100ish to $150 depending on store). The extra level packs can be quite expensive too. The Portal one is around the $40 mark.

Will it take off as a game? I dunno.

The thing that will sell well is the exclusive licensed packs.

For example, the Portal Pack. 

As a huge fan of Portal and a huge LEGO nut, I couldn’t resist picking up an official LEGO Portal set, even with the high price point for the number of pieces.

And judging by how hard it was to find this set, everyone had the same idea. I had to visit about 6 stores before I finally found one (the last one in stock) at JB HiFi.

I’m not sure how much this will help the game’s sales though - as most of the packs aren’t exclusives like this. There are Jurassic World packs, Lord of the Rings, Simpsons, Chima, Ninjago, LEGO Movie etc, but they all appear to be minifigs we’ve seen before, so they won’t appeal to the collectors like myself, and might not sell quickly if at all.

There are some more desirable packs coming up in future waves (some new Ghostbusters figures, Dr Who etc), but it remains to be seen how successful the game itself is.

In the meantime, I’ve got myself some Portal LEGO, so I’m happy.

Annoyingly the Dimensions sets don’t appear to come with instructions because they expect you to be playing the game, and I assume the game tells you what to build. If you’re just after the models like me, I found the instructions here: http://lego.brickinstructions.com/en/lego_instructions/set/71203/Level_Pack:_Portal_2

And just for comparison, here is a Dinsey Infinite figure I got cheap a while back.

 

 

So the other day I was doing my daily walk to the post office and I ntoiced a flyer on a wall for a Medieval Festival in Wynyard.

Wynyward is only about an hour away, and I was free that weekend so I headed up for a look.

A little on the small side, but quite cool all the same.

The best bits by far were the jousting and single combat.

 

De-horsing is no longer much of a threat - the jousting poles have balsa wood tips. Makes for a good show though.

 

The single combat is using steel blades (I imagine blunt) and real armour. No longer a fight to the death, you get a 'point' for hitting your opponant on the torso or the head. First to 5 (number changes depending on round) wins.

 

They don't hold back either.

 

Master at Arms watching on.

 

 

 

Well worth a look, although try and find a schedule before you go - the interesting parts were at the start and end of the day and I turned up at Lunch time. Ah well - live and learn.

 

I was at JB Hifi in Hobart on the weekend buying a copy of Lego Dimensions: Portal - and when I was paying for it, they mentioned that they had a special offer where they made a donation to a charity without costing me anything extra. 

Fine - sounds good.

When I got home, I realised they’d given me an extra packet - of an Air Triangle.

This is an empty packet.

So apparently when you buy one of these (or in my case get it thrown in) it gives a donation to a charity that gives musical instruments to underprivileged kids.

That sounds fine and dandy to me - but did they really need to make a physical packet? It’s plastic and cardboard that’s just going to go in the bin and end up in landfill.

Seems rather wasteful to me, even if the intent is good...

 

So most of my Saturday was spend building this awesome model of the Serenity.

I started just after lunch, and about 12 hours later I finished and finally went to bed.

It’s an awesome model - and uses a lot of techniques that wouldn’t pass muster with an official model, which makes it a bit fragile, but it captures the look of Serenity really well.

 

The model is available from a crowd called Etadyne Industries. Oddly they make spare parts for Saabs and custom Serenity LEGO models. 

You can either buy the instructions as a PDF, or buy a kit including all the pieces. I used some of my tax-back and got the kit a while ago, but finally got a chance to build it.

As there were simply so many pieces, it made it more difficult to build than I’d expected - made worse by the fact that a few pieces were missing, so if you hunted through the pieces for ages you weren’t’ sure if you couldn’t find it, or if it simply wasn’t there. Considering the sheer number of pieces that Etadyne had to sort, it wasn’t too bad.

The worse piece was on one of the side thrusters where there’s a yellow piece instead of a grey one. I had the yellow one in my collection - but I’ll have to order a grey one on Bricklink soon.

The Serenity will be joining me at Lego shows - as long as I can work out a way to transport it. 

I timelapsed the process as I built it - so here are 12 hours condensed into a few minutes.

Browncoats forever!

 

Ok - so there’s something wrong with this picture….